I recently attended a meeting of the Strategic Content Alliance in Cardiff to find out about the free resources they have recently published to help improve access to digital content for the public sector, including HE and FE and museums. Strategic Content Alliance is a project between JISC and a number of other public bodies which aims to, in the words of their logo, “build bridges to e-content”. The idea is to improve the sharing of digital content by and for the public sector.

The resources they’ve developed are quite diverse (you can get full details on their blog) but the one we focussed on in the session I attended was the Intellectual Property Rights Toolkit . One of the biggest headaches for learning resources/library/e-learning staff is how to sort out copyright clearance for digital works, and the IPR toolkit can help with this, by offering standard letter/email templates which you could use for getting permissions from copyright owners. Other useful sections include advice on Creative Commons and Web 2.0 legal issues. There’s also a colour navigation chart to help you home in on the relevant bit of the toolkit to answer your particular IPR problem.

The toolkit sections are designed to be dipped into and adapted as you see fit for local use. They could be useful for staff development or for briefing senior managers who need to manage the risks surrounding sharing of digital content.

The SCA project team are keen to get feedback on their resources, so if you have a chance to appraise them before 12 August, complete the short survey form on their blog. You could win a £50 Amazon voucher

The law clearly has a long way to go to catch up with the reality of digital content creation and sharing – and until it does, free support like the SCA toolkits should provide some help in ploughing our way through the copyright maze.

The Cardiff event was the first I’ve attended this year which has had its delegate numbers slashed through fears of swine flu. Despite the small numbers, it was a useful event and I can recommend the IPR toolkit to any staff who have responsibilities for legal issues, or who wish to make their own digital content available.

Thanks to Cliona O’Neill at HEFCW for bringing this to my attention. It’s a recently published wiki which lists a huge range of ‘virtual campuses’ across Europe. This inventory is the output of a project called Re.ViCa (Reviewing (traces of) European Virtual Campuses) which started in 2007 and runs till September 2009. It’s interesting to see what has been going on elsewhere in Europe, particularly in the smaller countries. I was pleased to see that the Gwella programme is listed under ‘National Initiatives’ though the Welsh country overview could do with some updating.

Re.ViCa is a project funded by the European Commission under its Lifelong Learning Programme, and its chief purpose is to come up with a set of critical success factors for evaluating the ‘Virtual Campus’ (for which the wiki offers a range of definitions). Their CSFs are still in draft and are available on the wiki here.

Re.ViCa is one of several European projects reported in the June issue of the newsletter of EuroPACE.